Kotak partners with Pine Labs to scale up its merchant acquiring business

By Leandra Monteiro

Kotak Mahindra Bank Limited (KMBL) announced that it has entered into a partnership with Pine Labs, a merchant commerce platform, specialising in merchant acquisition through innovative payment products, Pay Later offering, loyalty programmes, stored value solutions and other value-added services. This tie-up will enable KMBL to expand its merchant acquiring and Point of Sale (PoS) services to more merchants, especially retailers.

Pine Labs has a network of over 245,000 merchants across Asia and the Middle East. Through this tie-up, merchants in India will now be able to get the advantage of KMBL’s PoS payment solutions bundled with Pine Labs’ technology stack to help grow their business.

Shanti Ekambaram, Group President – Consumer Banking, Kotak Mahindra Bank said, “Retail and large merchants are making an accelerated shift to digital modes of payments, with consumers embracing a wide range of payment options leading to a transformation in the merchant payments space. Merchants are looking for a unified platform that simplifies payments with omni-channel coverage, bundled with value-added services. Pine Labs is a leading player with customised solutions for retailers and B2C service providers, and this collaboration with them opens up a significant market opportunity for Kotak to onboard new merchants and offer them an integrated PoS plus suite of digital payments and banking products proposition.”

Nitish Asthana, President & COO, Pine Labs said, “We are delighted to partner a leading private sector bank like Kotak Mahindra Bank to offer an integrated PoS product that will help the bank acquire new merchants. Our association with the bank has evolved over the years. In 2019, we had enabled Pay Later EMIs for the bank’s over 10 million debit card customers on our full stack of payments, commerce, and financial services on smart devices. This partnership grows from strength to strength and now more retailers will be the beneficiaries of our integrated proposition.”

Point of Sale terminals have been growing rapidly in India ever since demonetisation. The number of PoS terminals in the country before demonetisation was ~1.3 million, which has grown to ~4.7 million terminals in August 2021. The increasing demand for cashless modes of payment, will continue to drive the growth of PoS terminals in India.